Posted on 07/07/2022 7:01:48 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
I noticed the shoes first. That I was wearing them. Real shoes, the leather kind, with laces. After a year and a half, I was finally returning to the office, and that meant giving up the puffer slippers and slides that had sustained me for so long. Real shoes, I quickly remembered, are terrible. Likewise pants. Likewise getting to work, and being at work. Whew.
That was summer 2021. I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform; I make the commute; I pour the coffee; I do my job; and then I go back home. There are costs to this arrangement, clearly. I lose some time—time I could spend working!—transporting myself, in shoes and pants, from one building to another. I miss the chance to finish household tasks between my meetings, or fix myself a healthy and affordable lunch. As a university professor and administrator, I have more flexibility than most professionals, and I’m not required to go in each and every day. But even so, I have less control over each hour of my life than I used to—a fact that could very well be making me less productive overall. Indeed, it’s possible, or even likely, that my employer—and yours—could help their workers and the bottom line, simply by allowing us to work from home or come in on a hybrid plan. Remote, flexible employment might be a win for everyone.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
It sounds like most people on this thread, have jobs where they work online. If you have a job where you sit at a computer screen, I can see such people can work from home and not need an office.
It depends on 3 main things:
1) The type of work
2) Whether an office atmosphere makes the work more productive
3) The individual doing the work.
I picked the perfect time to retire (2019)...
Ian Bogost writes like a poofter.
Exactly. That's something the morons who run New York City should have thought about before they shut these businesses down in the first place.
For my Senior Project in CS (in college) I completely decompiled the assembly code for the VIC-20 OS.
Right down to the drivers for the cassette tape drive.
(Did you know that in the VIC-20, if a parity bit was wrong on a cluster read, the driver had a built-in error detection and correction block of assembly? Upon detection, it would instruct the tape drive to back up two clusters, then advance and read the second cluster again. A second fail would send the program to the "Error: File IO" code.)
I knew someone who worked from home, before Covid, she had a home office, and her company allowed her to work from home.
There was some additional overhead, such as running the air conditioning all day on hot summer days. But overall she was happy with it and additional costs were offset by not having to commute to work.
Exactly. If companies have to begin trimming employees, who is going first, the employees who are working in the office or at home?
What happens to those who relocated and unable to find work in their new location?
That’s it. I worked for a Fortune 100 company that allowed a lot of hybrid work ten+ years before the pandemic and already had discovered how unproductive it was. Depending on conference calls and intranet collaboration rooms rather than Zoom at least was somewhat secure, rather than posting every aspect of your business for the Chicoms. It started with “globarlization” i.e. outsourcing to China and India and Easter EU but then execs figured it would be nice to just stay in their comfy home offices rather than commute or move to where businesses were actually located. They called it “part of being a global company” but it sucked. For several years our CEO tried to run a 20-location business unit out of his basement office in a Chicago suburb. It sucked. Finally the brass realized it and rolled it back, then a few years later the pandemic hit and people working there told me it was like deja-vu all over again...
I not only had that class, but I was taking a total of 21 hours, was married, and had a job that quarter.
I got very little sleep.
“Whether an office atmosphere makes the work more productive”
This is a critical item and varies wildly by employer and type of job.
I am retired now—and worked mostly at home for the few years before retiring—and loved it.
At home I could multitask during boring corporate meetings but best of all I did not have to listen to Laquisha two cubicles down blabbing on the phone about her son’s latest run-ins with the law.
The value of no commuting time and hassle—priceless.
Sooner than that - my employer saw the writing on the wall, and has sold their building, going to lease a much smaller space, and have some ‘floater’ cubes for those that need to come in to work occasionally on-site. A few will work full-time in the office space, the rest will be fully remote.
The key is to have very structured work, with performance metrics. Which is always a good thing.
Maybe you could provide a little more context, so as to make that bit of information more meaningful.
Are you a ditch-digger, university professor, soda jerk, software programmer, cattle rancher, or what?
And what has your experience been? Are you more productive? Less productive?
Otherwise, your comment is about as helpful as your mentioning, "I like cheese."
Regards,
I remember thinking my 1541 floppy drive was awesome. And when I bought a 10-pack of 51⁄4" SD disks from K-Mart I thought I'd never fill those up. LOL
My pre-compiler project wasn't one I picked. The entire class had to do it. He gave us a made-up ML language subset. We worked (as individual assignment, not a team) on the entire project during the quarter and at the end of the quarter he graded our projects by seeing if our compiler would open, interpret, and implement his source code text file. Whatever procedures he defined, maintaining variables within scope, and nested procedure calls all had to be handled in my compiler. And the only experience each of us had was with our hobby programming some of us had done before going to college.
If people on the line have to come into work every day, everyone should have to come in every day
Zackly. If they had their way, they’d have you work, play, eat, sleep, shop, maintain, and entertain yourself in the tiny patch you call home. If they had their way, 99% of humanity would live on 1% of the earth’s available landmass. The remaining 1% of humans would freely roam, exploit, and control the rest of the planet.
He is a professor. His line of work is different, so he can’t say working from home is over.
Why? My job is different than theirs.
I had to code in 1s and 0s, and sometimes we didn’t even have the 1s.
I understand the sentiment, but that is perilously close to such things as, “Why should we have it so good when people in the Third World are starving?”
To each, their own. I don’t wish to force it either way.
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